Here the author of Fast Food Nation teams up with a former New Yorker staff writer to offer an entertaining behind-the-scenes look at the fast-food business, written for an age group that is one of its primary consumer groups: middle-school students, ages 11 to 14. Eric Schlosser and Charles Wilson introduce the 15-year-old who invented the hamburger; show how French fries are shot through a high-powered gun, and what makes them taste so good; reveal a secret ingredient that colors soft drinks (hint: it has legs); look at the six weeks a fast-food chicken lives before it becomes a chicken nugget; and compile a table of healthy and unhealthy human body parts to explain what happens when you eat too much junk food.

"Including passages from Schlosser's best-selling adult book Fast Food Nation and other writings, the authors dish up a somewhat-less-stomach-churning look at the fast-food industry's growth, practices, and effects on public health. Folding in original interviews, recent statistics, and published research, along with such spicy taglines as 'The Golden Arches are now more widely recognized than the Christian cross,' they trace the hamburger's early years and the evolution of the McDonald's Corporation's revolutionary Speedee Service System. They follow with vivid tours through feedlots, abattoirs, and a chicken-processing plant to explore how fast food has achieved spectacular international success, particularly among an increasingly obese youth market, then round off with glimpses of Alice Waters' Edible Schoolyard initiative and other alternatives less likely to lead to gastric bypass surgery. Readers may not lose their appetites for McFood from this compelling study, but they will definitely come away less eager to get a McJob and more aware of the diet's attendant McMedical problems."—Booklist (starred review)